I was desperate for Paul to like me, but he was almost three years older, so I felt I had some catching up to do in the credibility stakes. I achieved this by lying. I told him I was a member of the Kiss Army, the world-famous Kiss fanclub, and it worked. He would ask me what I had gained from the experience, materially and emotionally, but I had no idea, so I just made stuff up that sounded feasible: an Ace Frehley keyring, a Gene Simmons mask, some gold discs on my bedroom walls. He became jealous pretty quickly, so I knew I was on track to a healthy and lasting friendship.
After a few months of this, we began to moot the idea of a phone call. The very thought made me nervous, and I prepared for it by sitting on my bed, looking out of my little window and repeating to myself: he likes Kiss, I like Kiss, how can this be anything other than beautiful?
When the phone rang at last, our respective parents did the preliminaries. My father picked up at our end, which was a potential disaster; wherever I was concerned, he felt it his duty to load everything he said with heavy sarcasm. He could be ruthlessly offensive to anyone who crossed his path: he was usually inspired and hilarious, but back then I thought it was indefensible and humiliating.
My father was extremely thin – pipe-cleaner thin – and sartorially wedded to the 1970s. He wore flares and rollnecks and had floppy hair and was in love with music and driving fancy cars. He was the exclusive and expensive first to the digital watch, the calculator, the turbo car, the microwave, the home walkie-talkie system and the voice recognition radio that, years later, he actually thanked me for breaking (I broke all these things in the end, except the car). He was handsome, irreverent, witty and financially untrustworthy; a master of shuffling debt. Even within the bosom of our family he maintained a deep independent spirit and everybody simultaneously admired and felt intimidated by his raffish charm. He was, however, fuelled mostly by alcohol; not the kind of destructive appetite that wrecks lives and reputations, but more of an insidious ethanol trail, which he disguised with aplomb. He was never drunk, for a start, at least not that I was aware of, but he always carried that subtle scent. He stopped in for quickies whichever the way, and drove up to the Golden Lion every night after we’d had tea. When I went round to friends’ houses I’d always be amazed that their fathers were there, and not down the pub. He went on occasional two-day cooking benders, during which the family were strictly banned from the kitchen as he conjured up vast gastric assault courses. Afterwards the kitchen was a bombsite; in fact he enjoyed showing us the mess he’d made, proudly displaying the force of expression that had gone into preparing that one solitary meal. Unsurprisingly he never hung around to clean it all up; this was one of the prices my mother was paying for his companionship. But we all pretty much hung on his every word.
And he struck gold so far as I was concerned when he threw another couple of hundred pounds at one of the first domestic cordless telephones, which I lugged two-handed up the stairs for my first spoken words with Paul Bavister. I was mortified when my piping treble pitch was returned with a deep, husky voice. Thinking on my feet, I started to reel off a few names of Kiss songs, and he followed with his man’s voice, but before long we had reached an important agreement over the deep significance of Kiss’s ‘And on the Eighth Day (God Created Rock ’n’ Roll)’. That it was true and we were on some kind of mission.
Our letters dried up and the phone calls lengthened. Soon we were communicating on a nightly basis – marathon Kiss conferences that were starting to piss off both sets of parents. However, as well as the phone calls, I had secretly decided that I too should become a Metal god. For months now as I earnestly listened to Kiss’s ‘Christine Sixteen’ and ‘Plaster Caster’, I had gazed at a pair of electric guitars – one six-string, one bass – leaning up against the grand piano in our small living room. My father had knocked these up during his brief hippy phase. He’d bought the cheapest guitar and bass he could find (at Woolies) and taken them apart. He’d stripped off the vinyl finishing, pulled out the wiring, replaced the scratchplates, done something strange to the pickups, and generally transformed these lowly instruments into a pair of hotwired minimalist axes, on to which he’d then stencilled his cool initials: A.StJ.B.H.
I knew the bass was easier, so one day when he was out I plugged it into his giant Farfisa organ amplifier, hit a bottom E, and made the dog’s lower jaw shudder. After a couple of days of furtively standing in front of the mirror, I was still unable to play ‘Detroit Rock City’. My fingertips had turned scarlet and the bass kept sliding off my shoulder because the headstock was too heavy. To counter this, I played sitting on a chair, which was an important sign of my dedication to musicianship over style, but it was OK because I leant the mirror against the fireplace so I could still see myself quite clearly.
Then, one evening, Paul said solemnly, ‘We have to start a band.’
We’d both known deep down that this had been coming, but had been too shy to bring it up; I hadn’t told anybody about my bass explorations, not even Paul.
‘We should, yes.’
‘It would be a brilliant band,’ he said in a deep voice.
I was getting excited. ‘An amazing band,’ I said. ‘The best band ever.’
‘I play the bass,’ said Paul.
What? Since when? I was silent for a moment.
‘I play the bass also,’ I replied. Oh man, this was a disaster.
More silence.
‘I’ve been playing the bass for ages,’ he said. ‘I’ve also got a strap and four plectrums.’
‘What do you mean, ages? I’ve been playing for ages too.’ The dog looked at me.
‘Why can’t you play something else instead?’ he said unreasonably.
‘No, I play the bass. I’m a bass player. I’m actually really very good at it.’
‘I thought you said your dad had an electric guitar? Why can’t you play that?’
My father’s six-string sat malevolently in the corner. There was absolutely no way I was going to be able to play it; for a start it had almost twice as many strings again as the bass – approximately twenty. But then Paul did have the strap and the plectrums.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
‘You could be an axe god.’
‘Oh yeah, oh sure.’
I hung up, and reluctantly turned my mind to every Heavy Metal fan’s ultimate weapon of choice – our sonic call-to-arms, our horizontal phallic light sabre – the electric guitar.
THE SHAPES OF THE GUITARS
Think punk, think punk guitars. Could you tell a punk guitar from a non-punk guitar? Think reggae, think about the guitars reggae groups use. Could you tell these guitars apart from, for example, New Romantic guitars? Think Britpop. Think 60s pop. Think Stax. Think ska. Think Krautrock, think anything. There’s only one kind of music where you can tell what you’re going to get just by looking at the instruments.
Here is an electric guitar.
It’s the most popular and famous guitar in the world, the Fender Stratocaster, a design classic, popularised by Hank Marvin. Pop into any pub that has live music and chances are there’ll be somebody onstage with one of these.
Here are some Heavy Metal guitars.
Aren’t they much better?
Metal is the only genre that has thought, hang on, why don’t we make the guitars look like us? So that’s what they did.
It was